<html>
<body>
At 13:36 20/03/2009, Ginger Paque wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">I will be interested to read if
anybody thinks the Internet has an owner. I<br>
don't think it does. I suppose we could say the users own it.<br>
Why do you ask?<br>
Ginger</blockquote><br>
Dear Ginger,<br>
the question is the same as who owns the world? <br><br>
- Some will say the people. So says the WSIS for the Internet (a people
centric information society) - and ISOC implicitly says the users, that
Paul Twomey translates in "those who pay ICANN" (Paris, 2008).
<br><br>
- The USC has a definition which tends to say that the Internet is under
its jurisdiction. What the Tunis agreement tends to confirm for the
Internet Legacy, the Internet new emergence relating to enhanced
cooperations the USG prevented the elaboration to protect ICANN.<br><br>
- Some others will say God or nature. As the one who can change or stop
it..<br><br>
<b>A. Who can change it :<br><br>
</b>Since the Internet is men designed as (RFC 2026) "a
loosely-organized international collaboration of autonomous,
interconnected networks, supports host-to-host communication through
voluntary adherence to open protocols and procedures defined by Internet
Standards" people who can change the protocols and procedures
are its (co-)owners.<br><br>
RFC 3935 says that : "The IETF has traditionally been a community
for experimentation with things that are not fully understood,
standardization of protocols for which some understanding has been
reached, and publication of (and refinement of) protocols originally
specified outside the IETF process.". This means that those who
build and can change the Internet are ultimately the IETF Members, but
actually in refining what is specified/triggered outside, i.e. by leading
users. In Internet lingo, leads users are named
"@larges".<br><br>
These @large can change (build and rebuild) the internet in its two mains
areas of adherence:<br>
- governance: social adherence - what is discussed here.<br>
- internance (*): technical adherence - what IETF missed a forum for and
we created the IUCG for (Internet Users Contributing Group,
<a href="http://iucg.org/" eudora="autourl">http://iucg.org</a> -
iucg@ietf.org - charter:
http://iucg.org/wiki/IUCG_Charter)<br><br>
However, there is a big difference between the capacity to change and the
control of the change. Complexity and size dramatically reduced the
capacity to initiate and control a change as one single body. This is why
ICANN is not paying much attention to @larges. <br><br>
This is changing through the work france@large and others are carrying on
the "Internet PLUS" concept as an architecture, a testing
possibility, and a transition strategy (IUCG Draft under work:
http://iucg.org/drafts/draft-iucg-innov-dep-strat-00.txt). The power to
transform the Internet belongs then to anyone with a good idea and a
testing/demonstration ability (due to viral dissemination) <br><br>
That is, if there was not - as for the world - the people hysteresis.
i.e. the capacity not to immediately understand, accept, and adapt to
that good idea. So, it belongs to those who can control that hysteresis
through laws, publicity, influence :<br>
- the mission of the IETF is to influence those who design, use and
manage the Internet<br>
- the commercial world (cf. RFC 3869) where IAB says: "The principal
thesis of this document is that if commercial funding is the main source
of funding for future Internet research, the future of the Internet
infrastructure could be in trouble." <br><br>
<b>B. Who can stop it<br><br>
</b>There are three of them :<br>
- the IANA owner -hence the USG controlled ICANN/Google IANA
"war".<br>
- cyberwarfare units <br>
- bots and hackers - an increasingly worrying issue <br><br>
The only alternative at that level is the @large's response of a
distributed architecture of usage, answering the call for a person
centric multilingual information society. <br><br>
jfc<br>
(*) taken as "technical administration, operations and
governance".<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
</body>
</html>